Re: Browsers will never get it right [was Re:Blocked-base parsing?]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Woolley" <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
To: <www-style@w3.org>
Sent: Thursday, September 15, 2005 1:19 PM
Subject: Re: Browsers will never get it right [was Re:Blocked-base parsing?]


|
| Orion wrote:
| > On 9/15/05, Emrah BASKAYA <emrahbaskaya@hesido.com> wrote:
| > > On Thu, 15 Sep 2005 05:43:37 +0300, Orion Adrian <orion.adrian@gmail.com>
| > > wrote:
| > >
| > > > So I say that a new model is already upon us. I say that it's time we
|
| That's basically just describing the normal lifecycle of standards.  Start
| with bloat; new lean and mean targetted; industry committees; new bloat.
|
| > > > took a look and see why so many people are starting to prefer RSS over
| > > > standard HTML feeds and in that view I find we'll see that client side
|
| I would say that RSS was closer to a re-invention of gopher than to
| a re-invention of HTML.  I would say the Wikipedia language was rather
| closer to the original concept of HTML, although, potentially unfortunately,
| it has escape mechanism for including raw HTML/CSS.

David, good point about Wiki languages (there are few of them in fact with the 
similar concept ).
I would extend this further: appearance of Wiki languages highlights the 
problem:
HTML is not a content definition language but rather a strange mix of
content *and* layout definitions. At least it is used this way now. This mix I 
guess
is the source of many conceptual problems in HTML and CSS.

Wiki (and Blog, btw) languages are just an attempt to clear content from layout 
information.

To define layout it should be a different language or just one additional 
tag/element in HTML+ suitable for
defining layout and clearly separates layout definition and content definition.

Sort of...
<htmlplus>
   <frame layout="gridbag" role="showcase" >
        <frame name="east" role="sidebar">   ...simplified html markup here... 
</frame>
        <frame name="west" role="content" scrollable> ...simplified html markup 
here... </frame>
   </frame>
 </htmlplus>
('frame' here is not a exactly <frame> in current HTML)

I think that CSS also should reflect content and layout styling separation.
For example: overflow, visible, position, etc. attributes cannot be used for 
styling
content as these CSS attributes change (I would say - destroy) content semantic.

Andrew Fedoniouk.
http://terrainformatica.com



|
| > > > CSS and Javascript isn't a good solution.
|
| > possible (e.g. tracking what you've read or haven't, marking posts for
| > keywords). Since the structure of an HTML document is unknown on any
| > give site beyond the required html, head, title and body elements, you
| > end up not being able to determine what is content and what isn't.
|
| Making HTML simple was a deliberate part of the original design.  Whilst
| now you seem to need to take expensive web design courses to use it, the
| idea was that it was so simple that any secretary or librarian could
| mark up text.
|
| There are other SGML (and XML) applications, like DocBook and various
| electronic data interchange formats that are aimed for more sophisticated
| users or specific document structures.
|

Received on Thursday, 15 September 2005 21:43:07 UTC